It seems to have been forgotten by most people that the opening phases of World War 1 were the bloodiest of the entire conflict. In the social memory of the nations involved, the western front is dominated by the great battles of 1916. For Britain, it was the battle of the Somme, where the creme of British youth was thrown almost callously at the German lines over and over again for months. For France and Germany, it was the siege of Verdun, the battle of attrition that bled both huge armies almost dry. But in reality, it was the start of the conflict, the great "race to the sea" that saw the most carnage and yet is the least remembered.

Between the declaration of hostilities on 28th July 1914 and the Battle on the Marne, where the German advance was finally halted on 5th Sept, more than 800,000 men were killed and wounded. More men than had died in the entire four years of the American civil war just fifty years earlier. The first day of the Somme has gone down in history as the most horrific and brutal of all military engagements, the definition of needless barbarism, but this was like having that first day, every day, for more than eight weeks.

Ranks of French soldiers, dressed in bright blue uniforms, were led by officers brandishing swords and wearing caps - not helmets - in bayonet charges across open fields into incomprehensibly murderous machine gun fire and artillery bombardment. The British Cavalry mounted headlong charges into enemy lines as if nothing had been learned since the wars against Napoleon, and German soldiers marched at a slow pace, shoulder to shoulder, into the jaws of static defensive positions. The losses were staggering.

Both sides were utterly convinced that offensive spirit was the key to victory, that allowing these great armies to just "get at each other" was the fulcrum around which the whole war could be won. But both were facing enemies that were bigger and more heavily armed than anything history had ever seen, and what - in many cases - would have been seemingly minor skirmishes in previous conflicts, the ones that these men had been expecting to repeat, became mass slaughters on a horrifyingly gargantuan scale. That reckless urgency to get at an enemy has led to more death and suffering than any other tactic in the history of human conflict.

The parallels to my own situation were not hard to miss.

I had been on a full-scale offensive since the attack at the party; taking a step back and thinking defensively - even though I had no idea how that could be done - had simply never crossed my mind. I was actively hunting for them now; even though they were fleeing after their slaughter on Christmas Eve, they had been actively hunting me in turn before that.

The immovable object and the unstoppable force.

As the plane landed and rolled to a halt on the tarmac, it occurred to me that this was not just a fight for revenge anymore. This was not my cause versus theirs. This was war; it was bigger than just me, and a whole lot more blood would be spilled before either side could claim any sort of victory, even a Pyrrhic one.

The crowd of heavily armed and armored men waiting for us on the tarmac of the small commercial airstrip when we landed was more than enough proof of that. Armed to the teeth and clearly ready for combat, these were soldiers.

Whatever conversation that Uri and Marco had been having since I had returned from the galley seemed to have Uri a little riled up; he was climbing down the steps of the aircraft before they had touched the ground. Marco, looking no less determined, was close behind him.

Jerry gave me a knowing smile with a glance to the attendant, who had been walking funny for the last few hours, before stealing his expression and heading out of the plane after his superiors, only to wait idly at the bottom of the stairs in the icy January air as Uri and Marco walked away without a second glance.

I was just about to follow after him when Bob put his hand on my shoulder. "Pete, I need to ask before we go any further," he said seriously, the look in his eye reflecting the genuine concern behind them. "How much do you trust Uri?"

I sighed and let my gaze fall onto the giant of a man power-marching across the tarmac to a blacked-out SUV off to one side. Marco was almost skipping to keep up with him. "I don't know," I answered honestly. "There are moments when I can see how much he is invested in our cause, but there are others when he seems so obstructive to it that I can't see how it can be anything other than intentional. I can sort of understand his hesitation in giving out information on a source..."

"Oh yes, so can I," Bob said with a shake of his head, "To be honest, that level of security isn't only justified but is essential. No, it's the going on his own that has me worried."

"I'm not following."

Bob let out a sigh of his own and set his eyes to follow mine in time to watch the SUV pull off. "Look, I mean no disrespect," he started. "But if anyone should know how bad it is on the ground here, it's him. Going, well, anywhere in that part of the country without an escort, or at least some sort of provision made for security, is... fucking insane."

"Maybe because he is from here, he is thinking he can get around easier on his own without raising too much suspicion? Maybe he knows the lay of the land or something."

Bob shook his head, "That's the thing. Because he is from here, he should know that isn't possible. Knowing 'the lay of the land,' even on a superficial level, should tell him how bad it is. He didn't tell us where he was meeting his contact, but he said enough about the other informants being killed or displaced for an educated guess to be made that she is at least in one of the active combat areas or maybe one of the occupied zones. Either way, there is no chance in hell of him just being able to drive in without being noticed."

"So... what? What are you trying to say?"

There was another pause. "In my experience, when things sound like they don't make sense, it is because they don't. I hope I'm wrong, but I think that Uri has ulterior motives or at least ulterior methods. Both possibilities make me nervous when we know we are dealing with some level of treachery in both of our organizations."

"Hey, don't lump me in with those fuckers..." I started.

"You know what I mean, Pete. Someone is doing their damnedest to start a hot war between our species, and neither of us has the first clue who they are. At this moment, splitting our team and strength doesn't just make no sense; it's reckless and dangerous. What's more, Uri knows that. So only one thing can be true. Either he really does have a way of getting this information without needing us and really is genuinely concerned for the safety of his contact. Or..."

He left that hanging for a moment. "Or he is involved." I finished for him. "Either way, he knows something that we don't and has chosen not to share it."

"I am not making assumptions one way or another," Bob went on with a nod. "But I know you haven't overlooked the massive coincidence of his nationality based on where we are. Not to mention the compartmentalized nature of the traitor's organizational structure and its likeness to his obsession with the "need to know."

I sighed. There wasn't a single flaw in anything Bob was saying, there was no easy explanation, and as much as I wanted to explain Uri's actions as reasonable, I couldn't overlook the fact that something had stopped me from trusting him from the very start. "You think he is involved."

"I don't know," Bob answered after another thoughtful pause. "But more importantly, neither do you. I think it would be unwise to assume he isn't. Blind faith and questionless trust are not as noble traits as they sound."

I sighed again, much deeper this time, and pinched the bridge of my nose. "This is so fucked! So... suggestions?"

Bob just shook his head again and shrugged weakly. "I don't have any. There is nothing we can do without more information, and we are not in a position to get any. Even if we changed tacts and followed him now, we would be putting ourselves in the same danger as he is. We can only go along with the plan as it stands and just... keep an ear to the ground."

"Hey, are you guys coming, or what?" Jerry's voice wafted through the door.

I nodded to Bob. There was nothing else to be said and nothing else to be done. My one consolation was that if Uri was the traitor, I knew I could take him in a straight-up fight. But... In a straight-up fight, I could have taken Sterling too. People who know they will lose a fight head-on almost always find ways to avoid them. Bob was right; we didn't know Uri's allegiances either way. All we could do was be careful and stay vigilant. I waited for Bob to step out of the door, flashed a smile to the smitten-looking stewardess, and then stepped out into the frigid winter air.

********

The relative combat strength of any military unit can be measured by two main factors: Equipment and training. Throughout all of recorded history, when superior numbers have been thrown at superior forces, the latter has performed better in every single instance. Sure, you can point to events such as the battle of Thermopylae, where the now legendary Spartan three hundred - and the lesser mentioned thousand or so other Greek soldiers - held their ground against around one hundred times their number and were slaughtered to a man.

And to any of you who would agree with that assessment, you need to read more and stop relying on Hollywood for your history lessons.

The soldiers holding the pass of the hot gates were never going to win, but they knew that. They didn't go there to win. They went there to delay the advance of the Persians, and if measured by this objective, they were staggeringly successful. Let's be generous and say there were, in total, two thousand Greek warriors - there weren't, there were at most fifteen hundred, but carrying on - they managed to hold up the march of anywhere between three-hundred thousand to one million Persians for four days, giving the rest of the Greek city-states enough time to martial their armies and meet the invaders in force. That happened at the battle of Platea, where they kicked the ever-loving shit out of Xerxes and sent his God-King ass paddling back to Asia. If it wasn't for that fuck stain hunchback traitor - the only character in the movie vaguely accurate to historical accounts - it is likely that they could have held them off for significantly longer.

Another example would be the entire Russian campaign during the second world war and the waves of T-34 battle tanks sent headlong into the invading Nazi lines. The Eastern Front is so full of hyperbole and myth that entire books can - and have - been written trying to correct all the bullshit that was propagated after the war. So let's clear some things up. The T-34 medium tank was... okay. It wasn't great. It wasn't bad, and it certainly wasn't the unstoppable war-winning machine that the Nazi commanders would have you believe. The countless memoirs of former Nazi officers beaten on the Eastern front are an exercise in self-justification, putting some distance between themselves and Hitler or the Holocaust, and in many cases, can be read as long-form applications for command positions in NATO. The lie that they would have you believe is that the ingeniously innovative sloped frontal armor (an innovation that can be seen regularly in 12th Century castles) could shrug off the rounds fired at it by anything smaller than a Panzer III, an apparently inferior tank, incapable of penetrating a T-34 despite the fact that they were blowing them to pieces with alarming regularity and were responsible for around sixty percent of all T-34 combat losses. The technological disparity between the Nazis and the Russians on the Eastern Front was, contrary to what your Dad told you, practically nothing. The Nazies were not several decades ahead of everyone else and were significantly behind by the end of the war. What separated the two armies were better training, equipment, and veterency on the Nazi side and massive numbers for the Russians. Yes, the Russians won, but not only can a large proportion of their victory be attributed to the opening of the second front when the allies landed in France, diverting a huge amount of Eastern-bound forces to its defense, but the fact that Hitler was a drug-addled moron who kept giving the German commanders orders which were tantamount to suicide. Even still, the Russian victory came with losses so high that, even now, eighty years later, there is no reliable number available. A conservative guess is that for every German soldier the Russians killed, they lost somewhere between thirty and eighty.

That is... terrifying.

Waves upon waves of Russian tanks and the young men inside them were hurled into the jaws of the Nazi war machine, and despite what the lazy historian might tell you, quantity does not have a quality of its own. One hundred shitty made and poorly operated tanks are not superior to ten good ones. Because for those one hundred tanks, you need ten times the crews, ten times the fuel, ten times the ammunition, ten times the maintenance crews, ten times the spare parts, and ten times the training for the men expected to use them to fight. Russia had none of those things, hence their jaw-dropping, blood-chilling losses. The Germans... well, also didn't; they just had more of it than the Russians, and the so-called superior race was getting its ass handed to it on not two, but three fronts. Yes, Italy counts as a front. All of those losses came down to marginally superior equipment and vastly superior training and experience. My point is that every time quantity has met quality on the battlefield, quality has won every single time. As the Russians were finding out once again with their ridiculous invasion of the beautiful country that we were now standing in. Weapon systems designed in the 70s and manned by soldiers with as little as six weeks of training tend to do poorly against modern weapons designed to blow them the fuck up.

The moral of the story could be summed up when looking at the small group of men waiting for us just outside one of the hangers on this remote airstrip. Geared up in state-of-the-art equipment, they were the epitome of what an actual, real-life special forces unit should look like - as opposed to what Hollywood thinks they look like. Full, heavy-duty body armor, tactical helmets, and side-arms strapped to the thigh or chest, not the hip. Modern, encrypted, tactical radios, Polish-made Grot assault rifles with incomprehensibly advanced looking scopes and sights attached to the tac-rails, and not one of them had their chin straps hanging loose from their helmets. Those things stopped bullets; anyone with a modicum of sense wanted those helmets to stay on their heads to keep that sense where it belonged and not, say, spread all over the ground!

If any of these soldiers decided to sell the kit they were carrying around, they would make enough to buy the Queen's Head two or three times over. These were not the mercenaries I had expected when Bob had told me that a Private Military Contractor would escort us to our destination. Well, they were, but they certainly didn't look how I thought they would. They weren't sketchy-looking men in black fatigues and an assortment of equipment - like, for example, the now-dead Inquisitors who had attacked the party. These were honest to god soldiers, and all that shit they were carrying? They knew exactly how to use all of it with deadly efficiency.

What was even more surprising, considering they worked for the Inquisition, was that all of them were human.

Part of it was automatic, part of it was curiosity, but my mind instinctively reached out to theirs before we had covered even half the distance between the plane and the hangar. Each of them was, predictably, fanatically loyal to the Inquisition and to Isabelle in particular. To each of these men, the Inquisition, as they knew it, was akin to a secret society dedicated to maintaining order and world peace. An order that the micro-dicked twat in the Kremlin was currently fucking up in spectacular fashion with is ego-boosting crusade into Ukraine. But that was it. That was all the Inquisition was.

Not a single one of them had ever even heard of an Evo. Let alone the history of violence between our two peoples.

I suppose that made a sort of sense. If Isabelle was to be believed - as I was increasingly suspecting she should be - the Inquisition hadn't considered Evos to be an enemy since before the great-great-great grandparents of these men had been born. But at the same time, it was a little surprising, considering they had been sent here to help a bunch of us out. It made me wonder what the Inquisition did to pass the time these days and what it had been doing for the past few hundred years. But that was a question for another day. For now, I was satisfied that these men were not only who they were supposed to be but were determined enough and possessed the ability and loyalty to get the job done. I felt the brush of a familiar mind as I scanned through the thoughts of the last merc and cast a glance over to Jerry. He'd obviously had the same concerns as I did and was also scanning the minds of the men lined up before us. The small smile he flashed back to me told me that he was as satisfied with his findings as I was.

The other surprise that came from their minds was the fact that there were only six of them. Six! There weren't any more of them waiting in the hangar, and no more were on their way. In a war where Russian and Ukrainian soldiers had been throwing themselves at each other, fighting and dying by the thousands, I had expected we would need a significantly higher number to complete our mission. I had expected a convoy of heavily armed men to get us through the front lines and back again. But no, there were six of them.

However, every single one of the soldiers before me thought six was, if anything, overkill. They were all convinced that four could do the job almost effortlessly and the other two would be more useful on the front lines where they were badly needed.

These men had been fighting the Russians since the first days of the invasion. I don't mean that their company as a whole had been - although they had - but that these actual individuals had been heavily engaged in combat for huge portions of the past year. In the first week of the war alone, they had intercepted two teams of the Spetsnaz - the Russian special forces - in Odessa and had gleefully fucked with them so much that they ended up opening fire on each other. Then they mercilessly slaughtered the survivors without taking a single loss. It hadn't hurt that the Russian military was using unencrypted radio frequencies for their communications. In some cases, those radios had been looted out of the electronics stores of the city they were now invading. You can imagine the surprise of the inhabitants of Odessa when they woke up one morning, flicked on their radios, and were able to listen in on classified, live, Russian military coms traffic.

Of course, they didn't just listen for long. By the end of the first few days, the Russians were finding their coms routinely jammed up by civilians blasting the Ukrainian national anthem at them or just calling them all fascist cunts.

However, the more tactically minded opposition to the invasion - like the men before me - had used that glaring weakness to track enemy movements, feed them false information, lure them into ambushes, and generally ensure that they had a really bad day. Often the last day they would have at all.

What had started as a mission to defend the Inquisition field office until it was evacuated had turned into a months-long campaign for these men. They, along with about a hundred others from their company, had held up the Russian advance on the office and then the wider city for so long and inflicted such high losses on the invaders that the hastily assembled Ukrainian defense forces were able to retake possession of the city in its entirety and maintain Ukraine's access to the sea. This was fighting on a scale that made my recent experiences seem almost trivial.

Bob nodded respectfully to the man in charge of the group, a grizzly mountain of a man named Henry, whose absolute lack of facial grooming made him look like he had been born into this conflict and that war was all he had ever known. That or he had missed his vocation as an enforcer for the Hell's Angels... or a heavily armed Mall Santa. Henry was French and pronounced his name as "En-Ree," but aside from that little quirk, his accent barely impeded his speech at all. I couldn't help but wonder how much that was down to Henry himself or how much my abilities were filtering it out. Either way, I could understand him perfectly as he introduced us to the rest of his team.

Karl was from Finland, a nation and a nationality that needed no further reason to loathe the Russians. Jakob and Antoni were both Poles, possibly one of the few ethnic groups with more grounds to hate the invaders than even the Fins. Hans was Swiss. I was not going to make any jokes about the irony of his being involved here, that fucker was armed to the teeth, and finally, there was Gabriel. Gabriel looked Spanish, sounded Italian, and said he was from Greece. Confusingly, all three happened to be true.

Introductions on our part were made before Bob spoke up. "Gentlemen, you understand your mission?"

The five subordinate soldiers all looked to their leader to speak for them. Henry nodded and cleared his throat. "We are heading for the region Inquisition offices in the center of downtown Donetsk. I know you are looking for survivors there, Sir, but I must warn you. That area has seen some of the heaviest fighting; I would be amazed if the building is still standing. Any survivors would be long gone. Either captured or evacuated."

"I appreciate that, Henry," Bob nodded, "but there were more than two hundred people working in that office, and none of them have been heard from since the invasion. Even if we are only able to confirm their deaths or get some idea of where they evacuated, that will be something. The work you and your men did in Odessa was exemplary; you saved a lot of lives. Now we need to start thinking about rescuing captives or recovering the dead."

Henry nodded. Whether or not this mission would go ahead was simply above his pay grade, not that it mattered. Bob was an Inquisitor and second in command to Princess Isabelle herself; they would charge the gates of hell on his whim. His addition to the briefing was a testament to his professionalism; it was a consideration that needed to be taken into account, it was his place to say it, and he had without hesitation. He turned and wordlessly led our group to a foldable table just inside the hangar.

He gestured to the large map on the table. "This is a map of Donetsk and the surrounding areas, or at least how it was before the war, and here..." he pointed to a spot a few blocks away from the city's administrative center, "...is where the regional Inquisition offices were located. The whole area around it was ground zero for the initial invasion; only the outskirts of Kyiv saw more combat. The chances are that most of these buildings have been shelled out of existence and most of these thoroughfares..." he gestured to the network of roads leading to our target district, "...are likely to be blocked by the rubble. It is unfathomable that they will be passable by vehicle, which means we will have to enter the city on foot."

There was a noticeable uneasy shuffle amongst the rest of Henry's squad, and a pang of worry echoed from each of their minds.

"We are going to be entering an urban combat area," Henry went on, speaking slowly as if to emphasize the gravity of his point. "I cannot overstate how dangerous that can be. The most useful form of cover will be the shells of half-destroyed buildings, which are as likely to fall on your head as they are to block incoming fire. Every loose stone could be an IED, and every rooftop, window, or broken wall could contain a sniper, and a lot of them will, and all of that is before you consider the possibility of bumping into one of the many Russian patrols. This is not some ruined city behind the lines; the battle for control of it is still very much underway, and although the fighting has moved away from this particular section of the city, it hasn't moved away by much. In fact, unless we are very lucky, we may have to fight our way in just to reach our target. I need to be clear here; the chances of us seeing combat on this expedition are overwhelming. I have been briefed on your credentials; I know you can handle yourselves in a fight..." I flashed a glance at Jerry, who looked just as confused about that part as I did, but neither of us said anything, "...but you need to be aware of what to expect, and I need to know that you aren't going to do something stupid like panic and get one of my men killed."

The three of us - Bob, Jerry, and me - just nodded.

"Arnold," Henry turned to Bob. I had been calling him and thinking of him as Bob for so long now I had almost forgotten that I had come up with that name just to piss people off. "I recognize your superiority in the hierarchy of the Inquisition, but...."

Bob held up a hand to silence him. "Henry, I am not a soldier anymore. I don't know your men, shorthand, tactics, or training as well as you do. You have total authority and command on the ground."

Henry seemed to blow out a breath as if even bringing that subject up had caused him physical pain, but he nodded his acknowledgment. "We should get moving. As you can imagine, landing an aircraft anywhere near the front lines was an impossibility, and it's an eight-hour drive from here to the outskirts of Donetsk. Any other questions can be answered en route."

********

The majority of the car journey was spent in relative silence. Jerry and I were in the back of one SUV with Bob and Gabriel in the front and the other five members of Henry's team in the SUV ahead of us.

Ukraine is one of those few countries that are perfectly geographically located to have it all. To the North of the country were the rolling, snow-capped Carpathian mountains, a mountain range that could match the Alps or the Rockies in terms of both scale and magnificence. There was the sprawling urban center of Kyiv, a capital city that was the equal to any other European city in terms of beauty and history. The long and winding Dnipro River ran through hundreds of miles of open plains to the coast, which itself could have doubled as a major tourist destination with its beautiful climate if it weren't for all the fucking Russians running around.

Even in the frigid, frozen winter, the majestic spectacle of the country was breathtaking. One thing I learned en route was the fact that the Ukrainian flag, the yellow and blue, was a representation of the country's enormous grain and corn crops under its dazzling blue sky. The ground was frozen at the moment, patches of snow covering what would become those massive crops in later parts of the year, but even still, it was not hard to picture those yellow fields stretching out for as far as the eye could see. It was only by taking in the sheer scale of it that let me understand why Ukraine was one of the world's largest exporters of grain, sunflower oil, and corn.

We must have been about three hours into the journey when Jerry reached over and awkwardly brushed a hand against mine. So lost in my thoughts was I that it took me a few frowning moments to understand what he was trying to do.

A few seconds later, we stepped out into the mindscape beneath the colossal walls of my city.

"What's up, Jerry, I was wondering if you were trying to hold my hand for a second there," I quipped at him as he faded into existence in front of me.

"Oh ha ha," he rolled his eyes. "Look, we need to talk privately before..." He stopped and craned his neck to look up at the might of my imposing white-marble city walls. "Jesus, I'm not ever going to get used to that," he shook himself loose and looked back at me. "I wanted to talk privately."

"You mean without Bob," I clarified for him.

"I... Well, yes. I..." he paused for a moment, this time apparently trying to pick his words carefully. "I know you have your suspicions about Uri; I heard you and Bob talking."

For the briefest of moments, I considered trying to backtrack, making something up about paying lip service to Bob, or maybe implying he was reading too much into it. But I didn't for a number of reasons. First of all, there was no point; if he had overheard us, which only being at the bottom of the steps with the benefit of Evo-enhanced hearing, it was safe to assume he had, then making shit up would just be stupid. Secondly, we were both Evo's, and he would know I was lying, but mainly, I just didn't want to. I had made no secret of my mistrust of Uri, and Jerry had seen the arguments between us become pretty heated; I saw no reason to back down now, so instead, I said nothing. I just arched an eyebrow at him to continue.

"Look, I mean no disrespect," he went on with another nervous glance up at my walls. "I know you two got off on the wrong foot, but I just can't imagine Uri being a traitor. He has been leading the charge against the Inquisition for decades."

"And yet I have uncovered more in a few months than he has in all that time." I pointed out. "Have you ever considered that his position as the head of the Black Knights would be the perfect place to undermine the Conclave's defensive efforts while still appearing to be doing everything he can?"

"Yes, Okay, I will give you that, but..."

"And I know he shouldn't be able to lie to us, but neither was Sterling, and we all know who he turned out to be."

Jerry frowned and opened his mouth to reply, but I continued before he had the chance.

"I think the reason that Sterling was able to get away with things as long as he could is because nobody ever came right out and asked him if he was the killer."

"Yes, but you have asked Uri if he is the traitor."

"And what was his answer?"

"He... said he wasn't." Jerry was a little less sure of this part; he hadn't been with us in the Conclave Cathedral when I had told Uri that I didn't trust him. "Didn't he?"

"Actually, he said he didn't trust me either. He never actually answered the question."

"Oh, come on, Pete, you have to see this from his side as well."

"No, Jerry, I don't. You seem to be making the same mistake that he does. I don't work for the Conclave, I don't answer to them, and I am not part of their pecking order. As soon as they stop helping me, they will be in my way. I don't trust any of them!"

"So, what? You don't trust me either?!" Jerry was starting to get a little angry at this point.

"No!" I barked back. "But you have something going for you that Uri doesn't."

"Oh? And what's that?!"

"Faye trusted you!"

Jerry looked like I had just slapped him across the face. He reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose, and took a deep, settling breath. "She was my friend," he sighed. "And I miss her."

"I know," I said, stepping forward with a sigh of my own and resting a hand on his slumped shoulder; the other tapped the side of my head. "But she is in here; she is seeing all of this. She knew you well enough and for long enough to refuse to believe that you are involved, the same with Fiona. I trust her judgment. But even she is finding it hard to give Uri the benefit of what is a fuck ton of doubt."

"I just... I can't bring myself to believe that he is a traitor. He has been my mentor for years, yes, his methods are... unorthodox..."

"Unorthodox?" I scoffed. "Listen, you overheard what Bob said to me on the plane. As much as I would like to be wrong about Uri, could you find any flaws in Bob's concerns? Cause I sure as shit couldn't."

"I... fuck... alright, I will admit that Uri isn't exactly going out of his way to make himself look good, but... please... don't just assume he's guilty because he's a bit shit at playing with others."

I shook my head. "I'm not assuming anything. I would be more than happy for it to just be a case that Uri is a totally loyal asshole. A massive, colossal asshole, but an innocent one. Nothing would make me happier. But until I know for sure, we need to be careful.

"And how will this jaunt to a warzone help with that."

"I don't know." I huffed in exacerbation, "I was hoping to just smash my way through the skulls of every rebel Inquisitor I find, working my way up the ladder until someone tells me what I want to know. Will that happen?" I shrugged as I held his eye. "But it's the only road I have open to me at the moment."

Jerry sighed again and nodded. "Look, there was something that was said on the plane that I wanted to talk to you about." He went on after a few moments. "Marco said that the Russians had a way of tracking Evo's. Do you have any idea of how they could be doing that?"

"Not a clue," I answered honestly, "The only thing I can think of is maybe their ability to track the effects of our powers is a lot more effective than we first imagined. I mean, that's how they have always tracked Evo's before, right?"

Jerry nodded. "I thought the same thing. But that means that we may not be able to use our powers like we would normally be able to. For all we know, it could bring the whole lot of them down on our heads."

I paused and frowned. I hadn't thought of that.

"Jeeves?"

"I have to admit, Sir, his logic is flawless. Perhaps it would be wise to agree. Using your powers to divert a patrol or convince a human soldier to talk would be a benefit in the short term, but if that act leads the rebel Inquisitors right to us, then it could make things very dangerous."

"Fuck. Alright."

I nodded again. "You're right. If things go to shit out there, we need to get out of it the old-fashioned way unless there is no other option. At least until we know more about what we are dealing with.

"Thanks, Pete. We should probably get out of here then. For all we know, this could already be enough to track us."

With a somewhat relieved smile, Jerry faded out of the mindscape.

"Jeeves?" I called into the war mindscape air.

The aged butler shimmered into existence next to me.

"How is the computer doing with Donetsk?"

"Nothing to report so far, Sir. There doesn't seem to be any increase or deviation in Russian military com traffic. There has been no mention of us, nor anything that could be code for us, on any of the military or very limited number of civilian frequencies. Obviously, CCTV coverage in the city is practically non-existent, and satellite coverage is far from real-time. At least not the ones we have access to. So it is difficult to say if our presence or our destination has been noted yet, only that there doesn't seem to be any extra activity in the area since before we decided to come here."

"Or they could know we are coming and are just not using coms to talk about it."

"There is that possibility, Sir. But considering how few people on our side know that we are here, their knowledge about it would bring us much closer to discovering who the traitor is."

"Ever the optimist, eh?" I chuckled at him.

Jeeves gave a slight bow of his head. "I am as you made me, Sir."

I rolled my eyes with a smiling shake of my head. "Alright, thanks Jeeves."

"Before you go, Sir," Jeeves suddenly blurted out. Expressions of overt emotion were very rare for my aged butler, but suddenly his face looked like a mask of nervousness. "The computer system, it... erm..." Jeeves paused as if trying to gather his thoughts before continuing. "... there is something else, Sir."

I tilted my head at him and nodded for him to go on.

"Sir, the police have found and recovered the bodies of your parents. I'm sorry."

Time seemed to slow down, even more so than was usual for the mindscape, as a thousand different and conflicting thoughts and emotions burst through my brain. I had forgotten about the whole thing. Well, not forgotten, but I had certainly side-stepped it. In the aftermath of Becky's murder and the interrogation of Toussant, that piece of information had been one I had filled away to deal with at another time. With everything that had gone on since I just... hadn't.

I have said time and time again throughout this tale that my relationship with my parents was not a happy one. I would not have hesitated for a single moment in declaring my undying hatred for them; they were responsible - either directly or indirectly - for the overwhelming majority of the problems in my life and had seemed to go out of their way to inflict real physical and emotional torture upon me during my formative years.

And now they are gone.

There would be no explanation, there would be no reconciliation, there would be no closure, only questions. Well... only really one question... Why?

And just like that, the scenes of their final moments, shown through the eyes of Jean-Pierre Toussant, flashed through my memories. Phil, my father, could never have been accused of being a moral man; the cigarette burns on the insides of my arm and the scars of belt marks on my back - not to mention more than one run-in with the law for fraud - were more than enough proof of that. But he could easily have saved his own skin and that of his wife, my mother, by just telling their attackers what they knew about me.

He had refused in a manner that seemed almost heroic by his standards.

But one new question burned above all the others. Who was Sean? It was a name my father had muttered right at the end of his life, only moments before the bullet claimed him. I had never heard it mentioned before, yet it had been said with such reverence and with such obvious comparison to me I knew it had to be important.

And now they are gone.

I shook my head as if trying to work something loose. Faye and Becky had been killed right before me; it had been impossible not to confront the truth about their deaths. But even though I had seen their last moments through Toussant's eyes, there was something different with my parents, like my mind refused to accept it as real.

I had spent as long as I could remember cursing their existence and wishing death upon them. But now, I felt nothing. I was just as much to blame for their deaths as I was for Becky and Faye; I should be feeling guilt, or sadness, or - based on the years of abuse suffered at their hands - even joy or relief.

But I felt nothing.

Somehow, that emptiness felt just as profound as the soul-destroying grief that had consumed me after Faye and Becky.

And there was nothing I could do. So lost had I been in the hunt for revenge that I hadn't even afforded them the common decency of acknowledging their deaths. They may not have deserved anything more than a passing thought, but they didn't even get that. The absolute indifference I had shown toward their demise was... well, it was terrifying. I know people say that being in a war - which I was now in - changes you, makes you muted to the horrors of death, but still. I felt nothing.

I nodded my silent thanks to Jeeves and exited the mindscape without another word, emerging back into the rear of the SUV, leaning my head against the window, and watching the beautiful Ukrainian countryside roll by while trying not to think.

********

I suppose it would fly in the face of all storytelling conventions to say that the drive into a warzone was relatively uneventful, but that is exactly what it was. In the early days of the invasion, the roads on which we were now traveling had been packed full of refugees and hastily deployed Ukrainian defense forces, but now, more than a year later, they were practically empty.

It should be pointed out that the days when a battle was fought along a singular front line were long gone. Unlike World War I, there was no line in the ground where one army controlled one side, and the other army controlled the other, each of them trying to push their opponent back as one. It would be more accurate to say that the front line was the area in which the fighting took place. If you could imagine a map with the territory firmly held by Ukraine colored in blue and the areas captured by the Russians in red, the front line was a strip of land, varying in thickness, that lay between them. In open country, this was a pretty straightforward line that may move back and forth a few miles over the course of a battle, but in an urban setting, it was vastly different.

Everything about fighting in a city was condensed. There was no miles-long front line; instead, the territory that was controlled by one side or another was determined by how far individual units had advanced in individual places. What made it more complicated was that due to the obstacles provided by a city's buildings, that distance may vary hugely, not just in individual districts but often between individual streets. Sometimes two parallel roads, separated only by a line of houses, could be under the control of opposite armies despite only being a few yards apart. Battles were won on a street-by-street basis; they would fight over an intersection or a plaza, in extreme cases, even over a single building. Where the open country was dominated by the grand flanking maneuvers of infantry brigades or armored columns, massed artillery bombardment, and air support, in the city, an advance could be measured by which room in a building your soldiers occupied.

It was gritty, it was dirty, it was up close and personal, and in many cases, it could only be described as attritional. Several major city battles in the war had been decided not by the tactics used to take it but by how many men either side was willing to expend in order to hold or capture it. It was sheer brutality.

And we were driving right towards it.

We were about ninety minutes away from the "front lines" when the first physical signs of the war started to become apparent. The first one was a farmhouse, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with miles of empty fields around it. Those fields gradually changed from pristine and unspoiled into a pot-marked patchwork of craters, culminating in the house itself, which looked like it had taken a direct hit. Only about a third of it was still standing; the rest was a crumpled ruin of bricks and the shattered remains of the lives of the people who once lived there. We could still see the picture frames on the walls of the rooms whose sides had been blasted open. A few bouquets of flowers lay somberly on the ground close by.

At some point, this area had been occupied by the Russians, but the heroic efforts of the Ukrainian army had pushed them back toward the city of Donetsk, and as we drove closer, it became increasingly clear that the battle to retake this land had been a savage one.

A few minutes down the road from the shattered farmhouse, past countless more artillery and rocket impact craters and scores of blasted buildings, we passed the wreckage of a fighter jet to the side of the road. It was impossible to tell which side it had belonged to. A few minutes after that, we started to pass the flame-gutted carcasses of destroyed Russian tanks and other armored vehicles that had been pushed to the side of the road. Others lay parked where they had been hit in the fields on either side of us.

I had no idea what the Ukrainians had been doing with the bodies of the Russian fallen, but there didn't seem to be any hastily dug-out burial sites, and presumably, they had taken their own dead away for internment elsewhere. But despite not seeing the hundreds, perhaps thousands of dead, it was clear to see that this battle had been enormous.

It was here we came to the first checkpoint. For the briefest of moments, I was worried. We were a group of heavily armed foreign nationals passing into a warzone. In theory, we could have been fighting for either side, and I was beginning to wonder if the promises made with Jerry only a few hours earlier would die here when I would be forced to coerce these men into letting us pass.

Of course, I massively underestimated the esteem in which the Ukrainian national army held the men of Henry's company. They had all, apparently, heard of their exploits in Odessa, and a lot of them had heard of their exploits since. There was no question at all whose side we were on, and after a quick check of some paperwork, we were not only waved through but received an honor guard salute from the men manning the checkpoint as we passed.

Respect is an odd concept, but the reverence shown to our escorts was unlike any mark of respect I had ever witnessed. It was admiring esteem and appreciation on a truly heartfelt, sincere level. These men had fought for the respect they were being shown. It was earned.

Nothing I had done in all of my life had come close to matching it.

I expected respect for the same reason that Uri, or the rest of the Conclave, did. Because the measure of my power was higher than anybody else. I was quickly being shown that there was a marked difference between true respect and simple acknowledgment.

For his part, Gabriel, our nationality-confused driver, just offered a solemn nod to the saluting soldiers as he sped up our car to follow the lead SUV. It wasn't that he was opposed to receiving the praise of anything as self-deprecating as that; for him, it was a simple matter of returning the respect that he had been offered without gloating or celebrating the manner in which it had been earned.

Things changed dramatically after the checkpoint.

Whereas we had been traveling through pristine winter countryside before encountering increasingly dense battle damage, the area after the checkpoint was the first time I really was able to appreciate that we were in a warzone. This was not a resistance movement, this was not a skirmish, this was not mini-dicked daddy Putin having a temper tantrum. This was a real fucking war.

Convoys carrying men, equipment, or ammunition passed us as they ferried their cargo to wherever it was needed. Ambulances raced away from the front lines, doubtlessly carrying wounded or dying men from the forward aid stations to the more established hospitals. Ammo dumps and supply depots were unloading, allocating, and reloading stores needed to maintain the fight. There were garages fixing damaged vehicles, field hospitals to tend to the walking wounded, and rest areas where men recovered from the fighting. There were soldiers and press reporters everywhere.

It lasted for miles. Not necessarily because there were enormous quantities of them, but because the ever-present danger of an artillery bombardment or airstrikes meant that bunching them all together was a recipe for disaster and everything needed to be spread out.

"Phones off," Gabriel grunted in his thick accent from the front seat. "And remove the sim card. Russians can track the signal if you don't, even if it's powered off." It was not a request. Jerry flashed me a nervous look before reaching into his pocket, fishing out his phone, and tapping on the screen to power it down. I was a little more hesitant; this phone was my only link to the computer system. That was acting like an eye in the sky for us, monitoring as many sources as it could, gathering as much data and intel as possible, and collating it into as clear a picture of hostile movements as it was possible for us to have. Without my phone, there would be no computer, and with no computer, there would be no intel. I felt Jeeves shuffle nervously inside my mind, then powered down my phone,

********

The soft crunching of gravel underfoot and tense, nervous breathing were the only sounds as the nine of us made our way deeper into the city. We had gotten much closer to the city than Henry had anticipated, but as he predicted, the roads had become unpassable. There were points where, in my opinion, an SUV could have squeezed through gaps in the rubble, but Henry had vetoed the idea saying that they were the perfect spots for an ambush or a few mines or IEDs. We were to go in on foot or not at all.

Everyone had their rifles up. Jerry, Bob, and I had been issued with our own body armor, helmets, and rifles, and although I had never laid hands on a firearm in my life before that moment, I had taught myself how to use it. My internal editing station had downloaded everything there was to know about the Polish-made Grot assault rifle, not only technical and training manuals on how to work the rifle itself but military training programs on how to use them in real-world situations. I also accessed and copied the years of training and experience from each of our six escorts.

This, of course, didn't make me as good as they were, not even close. Actual training - rather than a list of things that have been learned - does things to your body, it makes actions into reflexes, and it develops muscle memory. These were things that were built into a soldier's nervous system. Live fire training had drilled into them an ability to think while under fire, rather than flinch or - in an understandably human reflex - dive for cover. Whereas aggression and violence were extremely human characteristics, modern combat is a far cry from what our primitive instincts allow for. Eons of hitting people with increasingly sharp or heavy objects was a matter of strength, adrenaline, and a mild amount of know-how. Anybody could pick up a sword and kill someone with it. With a little practice, most people could use a sword or a shield to keep themselves alive for a while during one of those fights. But those skills honed, rather than violated, those primal instincts. Duck when you are supposed to duck. Strike when you are supposed to strike.

Bullets didn't quite work that way.

Soldiers in a modern firefight intentionally keep firing at an enemy, even when bullets are flying past their heads, and fighting the urge to get the fuck out of the way of those bullets is something that has to be trained into you. It is going against one's own nature. Training is everything to a modern soldier, even down to the way that you hold and fire a rifle, compensating for the recoil, not flinching away from the explosive sound of the bullet being fired, not blinking or holding your breath. Even the way you simply hold it. I downloaded all of these things, and I had years of experience to draw upon, but what I couldn't be sure about, is if that training translated into the muscle memory and ability to fight that these soldiers had.

I was one of two things. Either an extremely potent combat specialist or an extremely well-informed amateur.

I wouldn't know which until the first bullets started to fly.

So far, in our slow but careful infiltration of the city, we had been lucky. Sticking close to the walls on either side of the streets, we advanced one building, one doorway, or one window at a time. Advancing a few feet, pausing to check inside for enemy soldiers, and then moving to the next.

Jerry was with Henry, Gabriel, Karl, and me on one side of the street, with Henry and Karl at the front of our line and Gabriel just behind Jerry at the back. Bob was on the opposite side of the street with the rest of our escorts, and although we were moving independently, it was clear that Henry was in charge.

At each intersection, we would pause, every man scanning every window for any sign of movement for an inordinately long time before Henry would signal for Bob's team to roadie run to the other side and set up to cover our own crossing. Over and over again. It had never occurred to me before, but the number of crossroads in any urban environment was astonishing. Our advance was unbearably slow, we had barely progressed more than a few miles into the city in the first three hours, but it only took one educated glance around one of those intersections to see why we were being so careful.

Every single window was a potential sniper nest, as were the rooftops. Any open door could hold a squad of ambushing soldiers. When we came to one intersection with the burned-out wreckage of a car in the middle of it, I was surprised to watch Bob and his team steer well clear of it in their dash to the other side until Henry, in a hushed, whispered voice, explained that any cover like that would be the perfect place to hide a mine, an IED or any other manner of booby-trap.

It was hard going. Not only carrying the kit and moving in a maintained hunched position - something my body was more than capable of handling - but the mental exhaustion that came with being constantly in a state of almost paranoid alert. But as hard as it was, it was also necessary. Letting our guard slip by even the slightest degree could get us all killed.

This was illustrated quite nicely a few blocks from our target destination.

The sweat was pouring from my brow and stinging my eyes as, for the umpteenth time, my shoulder bashed into the wall at the corner of the intersection, and Henry held up a fist for us all to stop. My enhanced body was able to keep this up indefinitely, but it still needed to vent off heat, despite the frigid January air, and that came in the form of sweat.

As I had done on the last three dozen intersections, I raised my rifle and started scanning the upper windows on the left-hand side of the street we would soon be entering. All I was doing was waiting for Henry to give the hand gesture for the other team to start making their crossing as he had done every other time before now when two quick bursts of static sounded from my radio earpiece.

Henry froze.

Everyone else froze too. Someone had spotted something.

My attention followed Henry's as his eyes snapped across the road to Jakob, the leader of Bob's squad. After a few seconds, Jakob started making hand gestures that I was able to translate, thanks to my impromptu training.

An open palm, five men. A close fist, ten men. So fifteen men. And a nodding of his hand up the street to our right, around the corner we were using for cover. It took me a few moments to notice that all of Jakob's team had their rifles raised and fixed at the same target.

Henry slowly leaned forward and looked around the corner.

He seemed to let out a sigh of relief as he pulled himself back into cover and reached for his radio. "Enemy patrol," he whispered as quietly as he could. "Moving away from us. Let's hold here for a few minutes and let them move off. Stay sharp, be prepared to withdraw."

I could see the grimace on Bob's face, even from where I was. He wanted to get to the Inquisition station house as quickly as possible, and the thought of pulling back was probably the last one he wanted to be having. But even at a whisper, Henry's voice left no room for dissent. This was not a suggestion.

For three of the longest minutes ever to have crawled their way around the clock, we maintained our silent vigil. Every man in the team kept scanning windows, doorways, and up each street before us, either side of us, and behind us. Henry was the only exception, keeping a hawk-like watch on the enemy patrol.

Finally, they were out of sight, and Henry gave his signal. Jakob's team dashed across the intersection and waited, their leader confirming Henry's decision for another minute or so before waving us over as well.

An uneventful hour later, we were finally able to lay our eyes on the once-imposing structure of the regional Inquisition offices. Without access to my phone, I had no way to check in with the computer system to see if things were really as quiet as they looked. The place was deserted.

And it had taken a hammering.

Any shred of glass was simply gone; twisted reinforcing rebar stuck out like crooked, jagged teeth from gaping holes in the concrete superstructure. Whole walls were missing, but the main upright pillars, the ones holding up the weight of the building, seemed to be miraculously intact. What was stranger, at least to my inexperienced eyes, was that the building was still full. A lifetime of gaming and Hollywood had led me to believe that these blasted buildings should be empty, just stark concrete walls and floors with the odd piece of surviving furniture. Instead, most of the internal spaces looked like they had been emptied of personnel only a few hours ago.

Around the impact sites where artillery and tank shells had obliterated the outer walls, the rooms were a mess of fire damage, shattered glass, debris, and splintered desks, but deeper into the building, there was very little damage. The odd smashed mug on the floor or the occasional toppled monitor. It looked... Messy. Not wartorn.

Henry, Jakob, and Hans did a quick sweep of the building while I waited in cover in the main lobby with Bob and the others. Bob was looking nervous, or at least apprehensive. In little under half an hour, the three soldiers returned and gave a nod to Bob.

"She's clear, Sir." Henry nodded. "You know what you are looking for, the rest of us will be looking blind, so we will provide perimeter security while you look for.... Whatever you are hoping to find."

Bob cast a look to me, then nodded to Henry, picking up his rifle from where he had been resting, and without so much as a word, he made his way to the stairs to begin the search for his missing brethren.

Henry gestured for the rest of us to join him in a huddle next to what was once the main reception desk. "It is going to take him hours to search this whole place, and the temperature is going to drop as soon as the sun goes down. A fire is not an option, so if you need to move around, do it. But don't go off on your own without letting someone know, and stay in the internal rooms if you need to warm yourselves up. Otherwise, it's time to hunker down for a long night on watch."

Jerry flashed a look at me; neither of us would need to worry about our body heat, but we said nothing.

"If you see a patrol, let me know... quietly... and hopefully, we can let them pass us by. But those Russian fuck muppets don't want to be out in this cold any more than we do, so I'm not expecting company." Henry went on after a few nods from the rest of us. "Coms are clear; it looks like we made it in without being spotted. Well done to all of you. So unless someone broadcasts our position, we should be in for a quiet night. That is not an excuse to slack off, though. I want you all to stay alert."

With a series of affirmatives, we were all assigned to a section of the outside street to watch, told where to go if we needed a piss, and left to begin our long watch.

********

The cold, late evening sun had long since set behind the spires of the Western buildings, the only remaining light in the city coming from the burning reds and soft violets of the Ukrainian dusk. The power supply to Donetsk had been destroyed months ago; even if it hadn't been, the grid was so disrupted by broken buildings and cratered streets that it would be unlikely to work anyway. As if to emphasize the point, a knocked-over street lamp was balancing precariously over the half-blasted wall I was resting against.

The city had taken a beating. It was impossible to tell which side was responsible for each shell hole and shattered building; Russia had bombarded this area for days before it finally fell, and then Ukraine had hit it just as hard in their unsuccessful attempt to push the Russians out. Between them, they had done a pretty decent job of utterly destroying what looked to have once been a vibrant, beautiful city. The tens of thousands of people who had fled Donetsk for their lives, now living in other parts of the country, or even other parts of the world, would probably scarcely recognize it anymore, let alone have the first idea of where to begin rebuilding it. God knows how many had been killed.

Now, what was left of the city was being swallowed by the encroaching darkness. Silence reigned supreme. Contrary to making the carcasses of once-imposing buildings look more haunted and foreboding, the stretching tendrils of shadows seemed to cover up the details of the city's demise. It was like the night was placing a blanket over the corpse of the city, respecting the dignity of the lost. It was still lost, but the visceral edge to that destruction was being hidden from sight. Even if only 'til morning.

The morning was still a ways off. Henry had split our group into sections; each team of two men had a corner of the building to cover, each watching the two streets outside it and the longer avenues branching away from us and into the city. With the light now gone and night optics only working up to a certain range, we had all stopped peering out into the city and settled down behind our rubble-composed cover. We would hear any enemy movements long before we saw them. I had been paired with Jerry.

"Jesus," he muttered, peeking out over the top of our cover for a moment before slumping down next to me. "This is what they do to each other."

"Who?" I asked, cocking my head to the side.

"Humans. It's something I heard the Archon say when I was training."

"Well, I'm not going anywhere," I said in a hushed voice. "Ragale me."

Jerry sighed and nodded. "We were talking about the whole Evo-Inquisitor war, and Fiona asked why we weren't enlisting humans to help us like the Inquisition was. This was in a training session with Uri, but the Archon was performing one of his inspection tour things and decided to answer for him. He said that to the average human, an inquisitor is no different from them, at least not in enough of a way that a Human would notice. Their danger to us comes in the form of their ability to detect us. To a human, they pose no threat at all. But we are too different."

I listened as Jerry went on in a voice barely above a whisper.

"It's like the thing they say in Men in Black. A person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky dangerous animals. And that movie hit the nail on the head. You put enough people together, and they develop a group mentality. Anyone not part of that group is different, and different should be destroyed. Politics, nationality, race, religion, creed, all of it is just a smoke screen for how different groups of people separate themselves from one another." Jerry nodded his head towards the haunted city on the other side of our barricade. "When all is said and done, people did that. And most of them did it because some asshole they will never meet told them that some arbitrary line on a map that they can't even see was a good enough reason to start killing each other.

"Humans, when they feel safe, are the nicest, most reasonable, and compassionate people you will ever hope to meet. But threaten them with something 'other' and they change. They will drop bombs on entire cities, fly planes into buildings, and happily march millions of their friends, neighbors, and countrymen into gas chambers. And that is what they would do to their own kind. What do you think they would be willing to do to an entirely different species? One that has a history of dominating them and has the power to fairly easily do it again? They would hunt us to extinction and then claim they were the victims, and you know it."

I won't lie; a chill went up my spine as the truth of his claim dawned on me. "But what about people like Uri's source? She's human."

Jerry shrugged. "I don't know. I would imagine they have had some pretty severe mental conditioning to make them incapable of divulging our secret. A method which, in itself, could be more than enough reason for humans to justify their belief that we are the bad guys."

"I mean, aren't we?" I asked after some thought. "Evo history isn't exactly stellar."

"Were you even alive when all that shit happened?"

"No"

"Neither was I. In fact, I can't think of more than a handful who were. Evos aren't born hereditarily; it wasn't our distant relatives and ancestors that did those things either. Just some random people who happen to belong to the same group as we are now. That is like saying all dark-haired people should be punished because Hitler, Stalin, and Ted Bundy all had dark hair. It's stupid. Any person would agree with you, but a group of them would certainly kill you for less. Is that history something you want to die over?"

"Not particularly"

"Then take a look out there and see it for the warning it is, man" Jerry sighed and pulled some sort of granola bar from his pack before taking a bite. "People are fucking crazy!"

I nodded slowly, not so much watching him eat as I was looking at the darkness around us. "Sounds like Thomas is wiser than he seems."

"The Archon?" Jerry nodded with a mouthful. "Yeah, he's a good man." I arched an eyebrow at him. "Okay, well, to be fair, you have laid into him pretty much every time you have seen him. I don't blame you, you haven't exactly been invited into the fold under the best of circumstances, but you've not exactly given him much of a chance to show you another side of him either."

"He's lazy, and he's delusional," I snorted. "He may be the best father figure in the world when it comes to good advice, but a father's job is to protect the family. His family is under attack and being betrayed by one of their own, and he is burying his head in the sand. Hell, I have more than enough experience with bad fathers but even mine..."

I couldn't finish the sentence.

Jerry and the others had all found out about my parents after I had first cracked Toussant's mind, and he gave me an understanding look. I could only frown; making a positive comparison to my father was something I had never done nor had the opportunity to do in my entire life. And yet, here I was.

"I know, man," Jerry finished sympathetically for me. "It's just... All this shit, all this war and fighting and... well, all of it, this is why I can't bring myself to believe that Uri is one of the bad guys." He held up a hand to silence anything more than an eye roll from me before he went on. "Look, I know he's a dick, I know he has made this harder than it needed to be, I know that you haven't seen eye to eye with him since the beginning, but I'm telling you, this is all he does. This war, fighting it, planning for it, protecting the rest of us from it. He has had the weight of the whole species on his head since before we were born. I know he ain't no diplomat, and I know he is really good at rubbing people the wrong way, I know he is about as agreeable as a mouth full of broken glass, but you haven't seen the passion in him that I have when it comes to talking about this war. Man, I saw his face when you won that duel; if that party hadn't been attacked, I'd be willing to bet my left nut that he would have taken over your training,"

The moment was interrupted by a shuffle as Henry, in a stooped, almost silent walk, emerged from the darkness of the building's foyer and crouched against our little wall on the other side of Jerry. "How are you boys doing?"

"All things considered, I'd rather be in Barbados" I smiled at him

"You and me both," he snorted. "All quiet?"

"Not a peep," Jerry nodded. "Looks like you got us in here flawlessly."

Henry nodded at the subtle compliment but was in full business mode. "Coms are still clear; the main Russian army has no idea we are here, and neither do any of the PMCs, at least not on monitorable channels. But that was never the issue."

"What do you mean?" Jerry asked

"I have been told there is a traitor in our midst. If they know we are here, they will hit us now, here, when we are most vulnerable. At night, in the one position that they know we will be in. And the only way they could know that is if your traitor told them. How many people know of this mission?"

I flashed a pointed look at my fellow Evo. "Not many, Just us, Bob, Uri, and Marco," Jerry replied.

"The two others at the airport?"

"That's them," I said.

Henry just nodded, looking up over the low wall and out into the street. "Don't sit still for too long; keep moving or you will freeze to death. If you see or hear anything..."

"Two bursts over the radio," Jerry nodded. Henry nodded back, slapped him on the shoulder, and turned to run back toward the others while I took another look over the wall as well.

Time froze.

I had programmed myself to be able to hear the thoughts around me if they were directly related to me. The problem was that there were glaring holes in that logic. Charlotte had pointed them out when we were talking about how inquisitors could have scoped out the Queen's Head without alerting me to their presence, just by monitoring who went up and down the stairs but not actually thinking about me. Not being aware of who I was, for example. I had never had the chance to correct that glaring mistake.

Henry was only a few feet away when a burst of thoughts erupted in my head. None of the enemy soldiers who had snuck into position on three sides of the Inquisitor's office had been thinking about me, just about the anonymous group hunkered down inside the building they had been told to attack. But as soon as they saw my head peek over the top of the broken wall, their thoughts exploded into my mind.

I barely had a moment to register them before I felt the order being given and the triggers being squeezed.

I spun back around and looked at Jerry, his eyes widening in fear as he recognized the look on my face. The silence of the night was ripped open by my yell.

"INCOMING!!"